very interesting mechanics! I would play something like this

@chupachup Thank you! I do wish I had more time for more stuff, like more attack cards, more enemies, and more diverse dungeon layouts. The the whole deck management and card visuals were a bit of a struggle and so I spent most of the first 2 days on that, and didn't really have time for content. I will definitely loot at releasing more in the future!

Cool idea for a dungeon crawler with cards for attacks and abilities. TAlso I hear ya about spending most of the time on one feature of the game, I did that with my title screen for mine lol. The music was pretty good too, quite enjoyed it

Good fun! Enjoyable walking around and trying to decide which cards to use. Would love to see more enemy types, card types and maybe a longer card stack than 4 if you decided to work on this further! Well done for completing so many Ludum Dares in a row :clap:

@soul-grinder Thanks! Yeah the big issue for me was Unity doesn't have any kind of Spline or Curve that's configured for UI, so to get the cards to move to the right spots at different screen aspects and resolutions I had to build my own UI Curve class that worked in UI Space. The music ended up working well, I know @rot-god didn't have much time to work on it since they had to do IRL job as well but I think it came out good.

@clymm Yeah I considered a bigger hand but I went with 4 because the game can also technically be played with gamepad, and so the cards are selected with ABXY, if I axe the ABXY selection maybe in favor for using the shoulder buttons to select cards? The main reason I don't mention gamepad support this time around for the game is that card management at the end of the dungeon and loot selections are not supported by gamepad due to running out of time, so only normal gameplay is playable with gamepad

It's a great game, an interesting combination of mechanics, and the game has great potential.

Really cool concept! Very impressively done with the time constraints. I did get stuck in a wall after the first floor, but I was also having trouble with the card management screen, so the character being able to move while that screen was up might have caused that. I would suggest disabling any input other than mouse clicks when the menu is up and making the buttons more obvious because it took me awhile to find them (although, that could say more about me :eyes: )

@tokto Thanks! I plan to at the very least release a post jam version with more cards/items such as improved attacks, different elemental spells, and cards that provide defensive shields, while adding new enemies, that have different attacks. The enemies funny enough use the same cards as the player, I just made a special "scratch" card for the initial enemies, but in early testing I had rats that shot the same fireball attack haha

@penguinmunch Did you play the Windows version? I haven't updated the Windows version but I released a patch earlier today for the WebGL (based on the time of your post it was released very close to when you commented) version that fixes the deck management screen issue, as well as an attempt to fix the spawning in wall problem lol. I'll be updating the Windows version soon I was just very tired after a 13 hour stream haha

Edit: The windows version has been fixed, @penguinmunch can you double check you're not running into the deck manager issue anymore?

Really cool to see a deck/card game here because I love them. I feel like with a lot of LD games movement is very clunky, but the movement in your game is very good. Great game :)

cool concept, I really wasn't expecting deck management in a jam game. Very simple for now, but with amazing potential to become something incredible. I think the biggest hurdle was getting used to the QERF selection for cards, my brain always defaulted to 1234 when I saw them lined up like that. Making it so you deck has limited shuffles or maybe make shuffles a resource that you have to collect/sell cards for would also add some interesting tension.

@jamesgames1000 Thanks! I have done quite a few games with this kind of top down 2D controller so I have kinda figured out what works and what doesn't over time. I think the player is a bit fast but beyond that, I agree haha. I grew up playing some very unique card games in the late 90s early 2000s that unfortunately flopped pretty hard but I was inspired to revive some of those mechanics.

@mdsalomon The QERF controls came from mimicking the ability keys from Risk of Rain 2, I personally struggle with using 1234 in games with WASD controls(for example I only use scroll wheel to select things from the bar in Minecraft, and don't like the game Smite for this reason even though I like most other MOBAs) eventually though It's why I implemented the scroll wheel to select cards as an alternative to the keybinds, they keybinds are there as a vestige of when I had ABXY for gamepad input(which is still in the game, but I don't mention it because card management currently can't be done with the gamepad)

The game initially wasn't going to have any shuffles, and you'd game over if you ran out of cards. At the end of each floor the deck would get reshuffled so you essentially had a fixed number of abilities per floor.

The shuffle was eventually added to make running out of cards less punishing but the idea was that when you shuffled, it would take some fixed amount of your deck size and remove it(so if you had 20 cards in the discard, you'd have some amount, say 18, of them randomly shuffled back, then 16, 14, 12 etc.) I removed the decreasing reshuffle because it wasn't obvious what was happening and why your deck was shrinking without some kind of animation which I didn't have time to implement.

There was also the idea that you could when adding or managing your deck you could intentionally move cards to your "Side Deck" and then when you ran out of cards you could use those as a backup life, or lose and use the Side Deck as your starter deck in your next run, turning it into a risk reward, where you risk not using powerful cards and stuff cards into the side deck so that your next run power is really high! Also turning into a slight form of meta progression.

I'd like to go back and try a version where you don't reshuffle at all, and maybe letting the player start with more cards to compensate, or as mentioned make it a resource rather than the diminishing reshuffle but we'll see what happens haha, I'm hoping the game scores well, if it does I'll consider pausing my main project and at least adding more content and polishing up the sounds and music and putting it on Steam

Edit: Dang I didn't realize I wrote a novel until re-reading it haha!

Cool idea, feels pretty smooth & has great juice on the cards & how they move around.

With the way it currently works, you don't really have to care about what card you have selected, & can just repeatedly left click towards whatever you're attacking until the appropriate card is pulled. I guess this'd become less of an issue the more cards there are?

I saw that in your last comment you talked about ideas around reshuffling & difficulties with it; I think it's 100% worth revisiting a no-reshuffle version & looking for mechanics that can work with that.

@mr-field Yeah there was also going to be a mana system, hence the colored bubbles at the top of the cards. Unfortunately that also got cut for time. The you'd have 5-10 mana or something of each type Fire/Air/Earth/Water and it would regen over time, this would prevent the ability to just spam to get a card which was why I had added the ability to discard cards(which is useless in the jam version.)

Discarding would let you risk losing a card in order to get a more ideal spell without paying the mana cost. Since discarding was fairly common(due to spread of heal to attack cards) it necessitated reshuffling, since you'd go through cards faster due to discarding.

I have some ideas of how to make the no-reshuffle work but I'll need to do a lot of implementing and playtesting to see if I'm happy with them but not enough time during the jam for sure.

Whooo, this is so much fun.Thank you!.

@eugenik Glad you enjoyed it! I'm working towards new builds soon with more content! Thank you for playing!

I think the game has some potential. It's a nice demo, but I can't really figure out how everything works: what are the red and green dots above the cards? Why when removing a card from the deck at the end of a level, it gets me more cards?

Also the best strat seems not to use any card at all and just dodge the enemies until you find the end. It would have been cool needing to defeat some spawners to reach the of le level, or something like that.

Anyway, nice game, with very interesting mechanics! :)

(P.S. I was stucked by spawning into a wall at the beginning of a level, I'm assuming that not intended? =p)

Very impressive project. Everything works well as expected. The aesthetic is really neat. However, I would like to see some animations for the character, but in less than 72 hours, you made a solid entry. It reminds me of an old game on which I often played when I was younger - Gauntlet. I guess that you know it - and maybe it inspired you. Thank you for this experience - and feelings. I appreciated your comment about my own game. I wish you the best ++

@axodo The orbs were initially for a Mana system which I'm adding in a post jam update, each spell required mana to cast, Mana would regen slowly over time, and you were going to be able to find upgrades to max mana and regen speed.

That was scrapped for time though so the mana dots mean nothing in the jam version.


I also planned to add doors and keys, where you'd need to clear a room with enemies to get a key, but I did not have a good way to prevent the keys from being inaccessible to the player, for example making sure there was always at least one room that dropped a key before the player would need it to open a door. The dungeon generator just made rooms and connected them, so I'd need to have done some extra logic traversing the level and placing keys which I didn't have time for.

Likely what you're seeing with the increase in cards in the deck management takes your discard and shuffles it back into your deck, so you're not gaining cards, you're seeing the deck count update as the deck manager takes all the cards from the discard and deck and then takes them out and sticks them in your deck, so if you had 10 cards in the discard and 11 in the deck, and 4 in the hand, a total of 25 cards, removing a card would remove all cards from the discard and deck and then put them back in your deck, so you'd now see it go from 11 to 24 cards. There is a bug in the deck managing screen related to it not putting the cards in your hand back in the deck leading to it duplicating the hand cards, so there's that too.

And as for the getting stuck in the wall I have been trying to figure out why that happens every so often. I teleport the player to the start stairs when they load but it seems that it doesn't actually move the player if they're already stuck in the wall.


@geckoo1337 I haven't played Gauntlet in a long time but yeah I have played it! I later played the port for the Genesis along side Fatal Labyrinth are both some of my earliest dungeon crawling games.

I wish I had more time for animations, it's one of my biggest issues in jams. In past jams that I did the art for like [Hellevator](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/lucifloor) I spent a _LOT_ of time on animations but I'm not really an artist, so they took a really long time, the background took me most of a whole day, and the character slightly less time, but because of that the gameplay suffered for it... In this case I decided not to focus on the art, and instead focus more on gameplay and mechanics.

I think overall for the jam it was the right choice. Depending on how well the game scores I may bump it up the list in terms of games that I focus on finishing and releasing, and for that I'll definitely be adding animations.

I'm glad you liked it! Your game was a lot of fun, I definitely wanted more levels to play haha

I love the idea of combining deck building with action. I think combat is a little bit too fast so I just used whatever cards I had. I think combat would really shine with more content and more strategy: certain cards countering certain enemies but I understand that adding content takes a lot of time...

Apart from that, there was almost no incentive for killing enemies, they don't stop you from beating the game I think. But I still had a lot of fun playing!

@woona Yeah I definitely know what you mean, I mentioned in another post I think the player is crazy fast so that's already something I've toned down in the post-jam version. I plan to re-balance a bunch of things to kinda slow down the game. We'll see how that goes but yeah I get what you mean by too fast for sure.

I've got quite a few ideas for things for the future, right now I'm adding in the mana system which will help push for more attack variety once there's more cards the goal is that you're better off casting different spells than the same spell multiple times, after that I'm going to be setting the cards to have types, like fireball having a fire element(red background card) and then doing enemy type weaknesses/resistances, weak to fire/water etc. I had initially set aside some sprites for at least 4 magic projectiles, 4 swords, 4 axes, 4 maces, each would have a different attack animation/range/shape. Axes spin around the player on cast, making them a bit harder to use for single targets but better for multiple targets, and also per hit do more damage than the sword which would be much faster easier to aim, and cost less mana for example.

And yeah the enemies were supposed to trigger doors that would lock, or spawn keys to open other doors, in the vein of Zelda games, but I didn't have time to design the code that would graph out the dungeon and place the objects and doors properly such that the player wouldn't get soft-locked. So many things I couldn't finish. I think enemies will drop Mana shards as well that will refill mana, since mana will regen slowly, it may be beneficial to kill 1 enemy with an earth spell that's less effective, to get a mana shard that refills all mana types by 25% or something in order to get enough mana to cast a bigger fire spell against a harder enemy that has a weakness to fire. That sorts of things. Enemies will also eventually drop gold, and gold will let you buy cards or something... It's a WIP as mentioned XD

It's fun, in my opinion.

@regmont Glad you liked it! Thanks for giving it a try!

At first, I thought it looks similar to idle game I've played years ago. But later, it's not an idle game so I played it non-idly.
I've managed to reach second floor at first run but I was spawned inside a wall and get stuck forcing me to restart my run. I've managed to win the game on second run despite only clearing two floors.
IMO this game needs more depths, in cards type, enemies and dungeons to be good.

@bloodbane Yeah the getting stuck in a wall issue has been something I've been trying to solve for a bit and not sure exactly why it's happening since I teleport the player to the stairs, but the player sometimes seems to not move, and so fixing it has been eluding me since the jam ended. There were definitely more things planned, ultimately but ran out of time, the actual card deck/hand/discard mechanics and animations took like an entire day, and then dungeon generation took another day, I still only had one floor and fireball with like 4 hours left in the jam. There was a lot more missing too but ultimately as the jam came to a close I had to go down the list in order of things needed to get the game built and uploaded first, which is why there wasn't many cards or enemies in the end.

Very impressed with how much it was put in place in such a short amount of time! Well done!
I like the card mechanic but I recommend to setup some random negative ones that you have to trigger to release your deck, but you have to be strategic about it.
I also recommend setting different cave noises at random pitches on a random time (frequency) to add more to the mood.

@binaryprinciple Thanks! I wanted to have negative cards in there the tradeoff was going to be like. A random negative card in your deck for some number of positive cards, or bigger better cards. Burning negative cards would permanantly remove them from your deck but have some negative effect for some duration. So they were like little spikey things you'd have to deal with. The issue I found was that my initial ideas for negative cards had to do with your mana, and the jam version had the mana cut. Some examples would be like:

* -1 fire Mana for the rest of this floor
* Water mana recharges 10% slower for 10 minutes

That's a good idea for sure! Unfortunately like everything else, the whole card/deck animation stuff took SO LONG that so many other things got cut, the sound effects that made it into the game were added in basically the last hour, in fact it was so close that the code for the sounds that made it into the game has options for that same kind of pitch variation code in it, but adding it would have meant working after the clock ended haha. That's how close some of these features were cutting it haha